Let's go bowling!---2014-2015 NCAA FB Bowl Thread

The Cactus Bowl will be the first bowl game not on national television since the last Freedom Bowl in 1994. It will be distributed by the American Sports Network (Sinclair) to those who wish to carry it.

 

You mean the Arizona Bowl.

The Cactus Bowl is on ESPN.

 

Yeah - you're right.

 

I'm amazed those ASN games in the regular season ever outdraw a test pattern: "Who's ready for a Charlotte-Florida Atlantic grudge match in prime time???!!!" But occasionally I still stop and rubberneck at the spectacle.

 

One of our local stations plays the ACC Network syndicated game, even though the only remotely close ACC school to our market is Florida State, which never gets stuck playing the ACC Network game.

 

I do not believe the ACC Network game ever draws a measurable rating here in Boston, but it's on here because of BC, although BC is almost never, ever in the game, either, as the rest of the conference has as little interest in it as Boston has in the ACC.

 

One time, on spring break, I was driving to Arizona and got stuck in the wrong lane in El Paso. Instead of continuing on I-10, I wound up in line for the border crossing. No biggie, I figured. I'll go across the border, turn around and come back. I'll get to say I was in Mexico. First time I'd been to a foreign country.
Got through the checkpoint, and on the bridge my car overheated. Limped into Juarez, pulled onto the first side street, and popped the hood. After a quick 10-minute, $40 cab ride around the city in a fruitless search for an open auto parts store on a Sunday afternoon in Mexico, went back to the car. It wouldn't crank.
To make a long story short, I wound up spending the next six hours trying to fix it, and the six hours after that crossing back and forth across the border to call a tow truck. This was the late 1990s, so thankfully you didn't need a passport yet.
There's nothing like stepping over sleeping Mexicans on the bridge at midnight, somehow not getting murdered, kidnapped or robbed as I'm sitting alone on my car trunk in an empty Juarez parking lot, and trying to tell a Mexican border guard who doesn't speak English that my car is only a block away and the tow truck driver with glittery Jesus stickers all over his instrument panel is going to take me to it at 2 a.m.
Paying $75 to get my car towed out of Mexico might be the best money I've ever spent. When I finally got the car back across the border and on to American soil for good, I was ready to kiss the fucking ground. I have no desire to ever -- EVER -- visit Mexico again. Ever.

Oh, and while I was waiting for them to fix my car the following morning I walked a few blocks down to UTEP and wandered around the Sun Bowl. Cool stadium. I've always loved how it's in a natural valley and they built the stands into the side of a mountain. So that was neat.

 

I'm on fascination street that the Cure Bowl isn't being played on Friday.

 

The fact that you made it out of there alive means you're ahead of the game.

 

UVA played in Boise a year or two after I graduated, and the school sponsored a bus trip for students. The team proceeded to hack up a lead and lose in overtime (on a touchdown where the guy didn't get in, but I digress). Can you imagine riding a bus from fucking Idaho to Virginia after that?

 

I can't imagine riding a bus from Idaho to Virginia any time.
I did the student football trip once from Baton Rouge to Nashville and back. That bus was pretty funky by the time we got back, and that was only an overnight ride. The smells coming out of an Idaho-Virginia bound bus would make Oscar the Grouch gag.

 

In a previous life, I was SID at a junior college in south Mississippi. One year, our softball team made the NJCAA World Series in Phoenix, Arizona.

We rode on a bus from Gulfport to Phoenix, straight through, for 29 hours. It was me, the AD, two bus drivers, two butch female coaches and 18 or 20 mostly butch 18 & 19 year-old girls.

(I mention the "butch" part only in case someone argues that being trapped on a bus with a bunch of college-age girls sounds like fun. It wasn't).

I remember the AD telling me after we got to Phoenix, "I thought I was in Groundhog Day. Every time I woke up, I was on that damn bus."